The Dream of Creative Writing

I have been doing quite a bit of soul-searching in the past few weeks and months, and I have played with several ideas for my future that are worth noting. One of these is my desire to write fiction, to unleash my creative imagination in a channel detached almost entirely from education and educational technology. I am not saying I am going to seriously do this in the upcoming weeks and months, but it is something which I have thought about a bit, and I want to reflect upon briefly tonight.

I’ve started reading Joseph Campbell’s classic book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” from which we derive “The Hero’s Journey.” This is a pattern which we find in myth, great stories of literature, and great stories depicted now in movies. It is summarized quite well in this TedEd video, which I showed to our daughter last week and is one of my favorites whenever I discuss storytelling and digital storytelling with others.

In chapter 1 of Campell’s book this evening, I ran across this lovely summary, a turn a phrase I both respect and enjoy:

“… these are the everlastingly recurrent themes of the wonderful song of the soul’s high adventure.”

Joseph Campbell, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”

“… these are the everlastingly recurrent themes of the wonderful song of the soul’s high-adventure.”#JosephCampell #Story #myth https://t.co/118BjY4HCd pic.twitter.com/Bzdc6W6lAz

— Wesley Fryer, Ph.D. ??? (@wfryer) February 11, 2019

Thoughts of creative writing with joy also bring to mind Liz Gilbert’s wonderful book, “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear,” and “Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking” by David Bayles and Ted Orland. With the image of the band Queen‘s retreat to a rural English farm in 1975 to compose “A Night at the Opera” and Bohemian Rhapsody, fresh on my mind from the movie by the same name, I find myself wondering what sorts of creative tales my mind could unleash given the opportunity to disconnect from the world as I know it now and tap into my own creative imagination?

As I ponder the professional opportunities and decisions which lie ahead of my family and I in the coming week, a desire to write and rediscover myself as a prolific author is one idea among many on my mind. I have loved so many things about the past four years, being a school director of technology, but the circumstances and context of my work has encouraged me to almost entirely stop writing. This is both a vocation and hobby about which I am passionate and dearly love, and plan to reclaim in the months ahead.

“Colorado Camping August 2018” (CC BY 2.0) by Wesley Fryer

(This is my first mobile blogged post using the new WordPress block-based writing interface, and largely dictated using speech to text on my iPad.)

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